Text that appears in images contains important and useful information. Detection and extraction of text in images have been used in many applications. In this paper, we propose a multiscale edge-based text extraction algorithm, which can automatically detect and extract text in complex images. The proposed method is a general-purpose text detection and extraction algorithm, which can deal not only with printed document images but also with scene text. It is robust with respect to the font size, style, color, orientation, and alignment of text and can be used in a large variety of application fields, such as mobile robot navigation, vehicle license detection and recognition, object identification, document retrieving, page segmentation, etc.